Hoping to start over after the events of The Ring, Rachel Keller (Naomi Watts) has moved to a small town with her son Aidan (David Dorfman), but the videotape that kills in seven days pops up again, killing a local student. Rachel destroys the copy. Aidan is then possessed by the ghost of Samara and Rachel must find a way to free her son and stop Samara permanently.
So, how do you make a sequel that’s the equal to one of the most frightening and original films of recent times? Well, you don’t. What shocked the first time isn’t going to the second. The concept is known, the strangeness is common, and there is nowhere to take the story.
But they made one anyway. They didn’t make a bad film, but one which pales next to its predecessor.
The Ring‘s director, Gore Verbinski, cleverly turned down this project, so the producers brought in Hideo Nakata, the director of the original Japanese Ringu and Ringu 2, apparently forgetting that the direction of Ringu was nothing special. They did understand that Ringu 2 was a dry, technobabble-filled waste of celluloid, so they came up with a new idea for a sequel, keeping only the concept of possession and a scene in a well. And what was that idea? Postpartum depression. Yup. Sound exciting? It isn’t.
The whole killer videotape idea gets tossed aside in the first ten minutes to be replaced by PPD. We get riveting scenes of doctors and friends quizzing Rachael on her mood and if she is really hurting Aidan. Since we know she isn’t, these scenes drag. They also kill the creepy mood the movie is trying so desperately to attain (so desperately that it includes attacking CGI deer, that are….well…it was an attempt). If PPD was going to be the theme, couldn’t it have been kept as a subtext instead of stamping on the story?
What The Ring Two has going for it are high production values, a really eerie ghost (Samara may not be what she was in the first film, be she’s still one bizarre kid), effective music, and Naomi Watts. It is the last which saves the film. Watts can act, which is more noticeable as her material is weaker. She makes Rachael a believable character who suffers and cares, and she brought me into the film. Too bad there isn’t an Oscar for Best Performance in a Poorly Conceived Movie.
While Watts may make The Ring Two a watchable flick, I still suggest you skip it as it sullies The Ring, which you’ll never be able to view again without this one squatting in the back of your brain.
An eighteen minute longer “Unrated Edition” was released on DVD—in this case, “unrated” only refers to not being submitted to the MPAA as there are no additional scenes of violence, blood, or nudity. What it has is seventeen unnecessary minutes, slowing the film down to a crawl. There’s extra setup that we don’t need, extra explanation of things that are obvious, extra development of side characters, and extra moments of Rachel dealing with the abuse charges. It does have a more unsettling version of Samara entering Aidan, which is one of the better moments of the film, but it doesn’t make up for the poor pacing of this cut.
It follows not only The Ring, but also the short, Rings.